Typically, connectivity between home healthcare measurement devices such as a weighing scale, a blood-pressure (BP) meter, and the like, and a home healthcare gateway device such as a settop box, mobile phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), personal computer (PC), and the like is either wired or wireless using a wide range of technologies. From a multivendor perspective, the wired connections can include technologies, such as a Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable, an RS232, an Ethernet, FireWire and so on, and the wireless connections can include technologies, such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wireless USB and so on and would be desirable to provide support for all these types of connections or to support as many device types as possible. For an application on the healthcare gateway device, to use the above wired and wireless connections and the attached healthcare measurement devices, software must be present on the healthcare gateway device which is aware of the above various types of connections; that is, which runs the connection protocol layers and is able to support such connections between the healthcare gateway device and healthcare measurement devices. For example, for the healthcare gateway device to use a Bluetooth enabled peripheral device, software must be present on the healthcare gateway device which is “Bluetooth aware”; that is, which runs the Bluetooth protocol layers to support a Bluetooth based connection between the healthcare gateway device and the healthcare measurement device. The conventional means of doing this is to provide software components called “device drivers” for the healthcare gateway device. Each healthcare measurement device with its associated type of wired or wireless connection may need a separate device driver installed on the healthcare gateway device to provide the functionality.
However, the difficulties with device drivers are well known. Device drivers are specific to operating systems and often to a particular version of an operating system. In addition, device drivers may be difficult to install and can interact undesirably with each other. Also, resource constraints of the healthcare gateway device may prevent inclusion of the multiple device drivers.
On the other hand, the recent advent of the USB has spurred operating system manufacturers to provide similar drivers for common peripherals and attached to a PC via a USB port. On Windows-based PCs, for example, these drivers are “plug and play”; Windows detects an attachment of a device to a USB port and automatically installs the appropriate driver. Unfortunately, the plug and play capability of the Windows environment has heretofore not been extended to remote and home healthcare systems and home healthcare measurement devices over wired and wireless links. There is also a trend in the Continua Health Alliance towards restricting to a single wired connection, such as USB and/or a single wireless technology, such as Bluetooth.